


as girls go

by gonnafeelgood



Series: Wandering Hannah [1]
Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-01
Updated: 2008-02-01
Packaged: 2017-10-05 16:27:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/43655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gonnafeelgood/pseuds/gonnafeelgood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She can't live in L.A., not anymore and maybe she never could. She doesn't know where she's going, but she knows she can't stay.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	as girls go

Hannah didn't even get fifteen minutes of fame. She got an uncredited extra role in _The Two_ fucking _Towers_, three gossip columns wondering if "Elijah Wood found a new girl?", and a couple of appearances in someone else's reality TV show.

Even Aaron fucking Carter at least got his own reality TV show and an album or something. And Hannah is clearly much cooler than Aaron Carter.

Sure, Hannah met lots of famous people and fucked her fair share of them. Well, her share and maybe Kelly's, too. The point is, she knows famous people, but _her_ shitty seven minutes of fame were all related to someone else. Like every other part of her stupid fucking life, it was all about someone that's not her, riding their coattails.

Boring.

That's really Hannah's problem with L.A., too. It's boring, it's tedious, and it's never been her town or her life and she's just so fucking over it.

"I don't get it," Kelly's voice is tinny through the cell phone speaker. No matter how much money Hannah spends on her cell phones, they never sound right.

They never sound like people are really there.

"I just. It's not working here," Hannah throws another skirt in the bag, packing haphazardly and erratically.

Packing is stressful.

"Right, but you don't know where you're _going_," Kelly's voice has gotten softer since she'd moved back to London, lost some of the soft half-American tones she'd picked up from Hannah and sliding back into sounding like Sharon and Ozzy. It's not that she's gotten quieter, just that she's … different.

She's in London and not L.A. and all of the text messages, e-mails, and expensive international phone calling plans are never going to split the difference between _here_ and _there_.

"I know, okay?" Hannah says sharply. "I know."

"At least you don't have to worry about supporting yourself," Kelly says in the philosophical tones that only someone who understands can really pull off.

Yeah, well, Hannah may have enough (of Elijah's) money that she'll never have to work if she doesn't want to, but that doesn't mean that she has enough money that she'll never have to live.

Like, for real.

She can't live in L.A., not anymore and maybe she never could. She doesn't know where she's going, but she knows she can't stay.

*

Her first stop, the first try, is San Francisco. Everyone loves it there, right? It's all hippies and progressive politics and seals underneath the piers or something.

And the thing is, it should be different. It should be colder and the beaches should be rockier and everything should be different, but it's all the fucking same.

She still runs into people that are connected to Elijah and not to her – Clea Duvall in a bookstore and Henry Mortensen in this amazing restaurant in Little Italy that has garlic in everything, even their martinis. It's not like they weren't cool to her – all of Elijah's friends have always been cool to her – but it's still Elijah's friend Clea that she trades book recommendations with in the middle of City Light Books.

San Francisco is colder and rockier and the people aren't as tan, but it's not different. Not enough.

*

After San Francisco, Hannah sees that she kind of doesn't know what she wants. Every time she's thought it was right (Dominic, acting, San Francisco), she ends up vaguely disappointed and frustrated all over again.

She doesn't know where she wants to go, but she knows it's not L.A. and it apparently isn't San Francisco, so she buys a month-long unlimited ride ticket on Amtrak, takes the BART to Oakland and just hops on.

She'll figure it out, maybe.

*

Every time the train stops, Hannah leaves more things behind. Not figuratively, literally.

Life is not a fucking metaphor.

Her bags are too heavy and she's getting tired of lugging them around, so Hannah gives six purses that she's never used to a little girl who played Go Fish with her in the lounge car for two hours. She hasn't worn the ridiculous heels that she basically lived in when she was in L.A. since she left, so she throws those in a paper bag and just drops them off in a train depot outside of Salt Lake City with "Free" scrawled on the outside of the bag. She likes to imagine that some fashion-forward teenage girl in Provo finds them and it makes her day.

Or maybe a homeless dude finds them and sells them to the local thrift store.

Whatever.

*

At one point, Hannah is talking to Brian, one of the Amtrak conductors who stands outside on the platform with her to smoke. He's told her all about working schedules with Amtrak, how they travel the same two or three routes over and over again, how they work four days on and four days off. It's kind of insane, but she guesses that there must be benefits – Brian knows every inch of the Chicago-to-Seattle/Portland and Oakland-to-Chicago.

Hannah's been aimlessly riding for a day and a half at this point, sloughing off possessions and maybe other things that shoes and handbags could be metaphors for. The conductors don't seem to know what to do with her, but she doesn't try to sneak cigarettes in the tiny train bathrooms (no matter how much she'd like to) and she says "thank you" when they hand her the scratchy train blanket that comes with her ticket, so they seem to like her okay.

"You're on the Hop On, Hop Off ticket, ay?" Brian says as he blows smoke out of his nose. He has his sleeves rolled up a little, she can see the ghosts of tattoos on his forearms. His accent is a muted Great Lakes accent and he really honest-to-God says "ay" all the time.

It's like talking to someone from _Fargo_. It's awesome.

"What?" she says, looking around like that non-sequiter would make more sense if she squinted.

"The ticket, where you can go anywhere you want for a set fee? Whatever they call it now, it used to be a Hop On, Hop Off,"

"Okay," she says, drawing the word out into a half-question.

"Why haven't you hopped off?" Brian asks, stubbing his cigarette out and turning to her.

Hannah flips her sunglasses down from her hair onto her face, turning her face away.

She has no idea.

*

So it's not like Brian's challenge got to her or whatever, but Hannah starts hopping off. The first time is in Denver. Denver is fine, the people are nice and everyone seems to be wearing hiking boots and women don't wear much makeup, but it's just all too crunchy granola for Hannah. And really, it's fucking weird to have all of this environmental, hippy-dippy shit in a place where the smog is worse than L.A., where it has a _name_.

After that, Hannah tries Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, Atlanta. She intentionally skips right over the trains that go to New York – if she's escaping being in the shadow, the last fucking thing she's going to do is try to make the city that used to belong to her and Elijah into _her_ city. She's searching, not stupid.

The cities are ... well, parts of them are awesome. They're all different, but they're still kind of all the same. At least, they're all not right. Chicago is too fucking cold and there are millions of hipsters there who are just too goddamn proud of being from a city that is freezing and has shitty transit and is almost as expensive as L.A. but doesn't have the sun.

Baltimore is cool at first, a perfect balance between gritty and beautiful, balancing all of this water with big, gray, industrial structures. They have amazing pasta but terrible Thai food and nobody walks there. If Hannah wanted to have to own a car, she would have stayed in Southern California.

Cleveland is in Ohio. Enough said.

Atlanta is horrifyingly hot, even in February. Hannah is sticky all the time, her hair is always clinging to the back of her neck and she can't always understand the guy who serves her coffee in the morning. She thinks he's telling her she's pretty, but she can't be sure and she doesn't like it when she has to think so hard just to understand the words coming out of people's mouths.

It could be worse. At least she's stopped running into Elijah's friends, she's stopped being anywhere where people might half-recognize her and that's different enough, but she still doesn't have shit of her own. Every city she stops in, she's a visitor. And, apparently, being an anonymous visitor wasn't the difference she was looking for.

*

Hannah doesn't mean to end up in Montana. Who the fuck ends up in Montana on purpose?

But, eventually, she tries what feels like every other place and they're all wrong and she just jumps on the Empire Builder because she thinks that Brian mentioned he might be working it in April and she wouldn't mind seeing someone who knows her name.

She's given away a lot of stuff, most of the shit that she had thought of as vital – books and clothes and accessories and her miniature DVD player. When she boards the train in Chicago, she only has a backpack and a carry-on-sized rolly bag.

She really doesn't own much anymore. It makes it easier to move.

*

She steps out in Whitefish partially because she's hungry for something that doesn't come from a microwave or a dining car and Brian tells her that Whitefish is the last stop where restaurants will be open until tomorrow morning. She rubs her eyes a little and hefts her backpack onto her shoulders.

It's not cold, exactly. It's 9:30 at night in late April in Montana, though, which means it's not warm, either. Hannah wraps the scarf Kelly knitted for her around her neck another time, playing with the ends of it as she scans the small railway station for a taxi stand.

As much as Hannah has traveled in the last few months, she's always stopped in cities. It's not that places like Cumberland, West Virginia or Winnemucca, Nevada haven't sounded interesting, but she doesn't even really know how to find a hotel in a small town. Brian assures her, however, that Whitefish isn't that small.

Brian is a fucking liar.

Whitefish is tiny. A gray-haired man with a surprisingly-not-creepy mustache has to visibly control his smirk when she asks where she can get a cab.

"No taxis in this town, hon," he says, his hazel eyes crinkling around the corners. He flips his keys in his hand as he turns to wave again at a red-haired girl walking through the doors toward the train.

"No … how the hell am I supposed to get anywhere?" Hannah asks, her face set. Stupid Brian and his stupid lies.

"You could rent a car from the Hertz counter," the man points to the tiny, tiny rental counter in the corner of the room. He eyes Hannah's matching luggage and leather jacket, raising an eyebrow. "Or … are you staying in Whitefish? I guess most of the nicer hotels probably have shuttles."

Hannah makes a face and shakes her head. "I don't know where I'm staying. I'm just hungry."

"Well," the man says. "Your best bet is probably to rent a car and drive to Kalispell. More choices for food and hotels there."

Hannah sighs. Technically, she _has_ a driver's license, but she hasn't used it regularly in years. Cabs were easier once she could afford them and she hasn't stayed anywhere long enough lately to need a car.

"Do I need four-wheel drive?" she asks the man as she steels herself for driving.

He laughs, but it's not mean. It's just a genuinely-amused laugh. "We're in Montana, kiddo, but it is April. You're not going to hit a freak snowstorm."

He pauses then, as if he's thinking.

"Well, probably. We did have snow in June in '97. But that hasn't happened in years."

Oh, that's just awesome.

*

Hannah manages to get a car, a gas-guzzling SUV even though she feels like she should ask for a Prius, but she's fucking driving so she gets to make the environmental decision. And she's going with four-wheel drive, no matter what the smiling dude says. She rents the car and gets directions from the Hertz guy that consist of "hit the highway and stay on it until you see Kalispell."

It takes her longer than she thinks it should to get there, especially since Whitefish has like seventeen people in it and shouldn't take that long to drive through. But she's a slow driver, and she gets lost a bunch of times.

And the roads are slick. Or something. Maybe she's a _shitty_ driver.

But she gets there and Kalispell isn't so much a "city" as it is a "slightly larger town," but they do have more restaurants and she sees a few hotels without names connected to any socialite princesses that Hannah has thrown drinks on in clubs.

So that's nice.

She ends up eating at a steakhouse. She tried being vegetarian in 1999, but it never really stuck. Kelly ate meat and most of the Hobbits ate meat, so her primary influences just weren't people who knew what the hell else you ate if you weren't willing to eat chicken strips or a hamburger. She kept telling people that she was a vegetarian for a while, though, because it gave her a good excuse not to eat most of the food offered to her.

Since she's been out of L.A., though, Hannah's found herself less and less worried with all of the bullshit that used to control her life. So sometimes she'll eat a hamburger instead of a salad or drink a beer instead of a vodka and diet coke. And really, Hannah figures, if you're going to be in Montana, you should really go with the state specialty.

Which is, apparently, anything that has ever had a pulse.

It is possibly the best steak Hannah's ever tasted – she'd just asked the waitress to bring her a good local beer and the best steak they had. She'd expected something with goat cheese and greens and garlic-sautéed mushrooms, but she'd gotten a nice deep amber beer that was made in a town 2 hours away and a clean, rare venison steak.

It's the best food Hannah's had in weeks. Maybe months.

*

The steak was a good start, so Hannah had high hopes for her Montana hotel. She stays on the highway that she drove in on, which apparently goes straight through the middle of town. She sees a couple of roadside motels, a shitload of bars, and a little ornate building that may actually be a courthouse. It's a few miles through what is apparently the middle of town that she sees an inn with an airplane on it's sign, with a "Vacancies" sign lit.

The Aero Inn.

Whatever, it'll work.

*

There is nothing wrong with the Aero Inn, actually. The guy who checks her in is a thin, older guy who actually owns it. The room is clean and the shower is hot and the water pressure is surprisingly good. They don't have a restaurant, but they are right next to a decent shitty-Mexican food restaurant and they have coffee and tea and doughnuts in the morning.

Not that Hannah eats the doughnuts, of course. But she might. Someday.

*

Hannah will never be sure why she stays. Maybe it's because Gib, the guy who checked her in, is at the front desk the next morning when she's going out to her car and greets her by name. Maybe it's because she can find her way around without getting lost. Maybe it's just because it's pretty and there are lakes that are a ten minute drive away and Hannah's never been this close to this much green stuff. And there are little book stores in hidden towns and bars that don't have televisions in them. There are gambling machines everywhere, but no slot machines, and Hannah has started playing 50 cent Keno on the machine in the gas station while her car fills up.

It's the strangest place on earth.

She's been in Kalispell for three days when she talks to Kelly, trying to explain the place and probably failing. Kelly doesn't sound bitchy or doubtful, which is an obvious sign that she's worried.

Two days after that, a postcard arrives for Hannah at the hotel. It's a black-and-white shot of a skyscraper in New York, set against a background of smoke. It's beautiful and vaguely in bad taste and perfectly Viggo.

On the back, there is only a set of numbers, a street name, and a zip code scrawled in the handwriting that Viggo only has when he's writing left-handed.

*

The address is a _tiny_ little house near a trailer park. It's got Viggo's name written all over it. Well, sort of. The actual writing is only on the living room floor. Someone has scrawled "HI HANNAH" in gorgeous calligraphy in red and black on one of the walls.

Fucking Viggo.

At least someone thinks she's onto something here.

*

It seems weird, but there are like no people her age at the fucking bars here. She's tried, gone to the places along the Main Street that doesn't have parking meters (which actually confuses her to the point that she stopped and stared at the empty spot on the pavement the first time she parked there). And there are 50 year-olds at Moose's and nobody at the City Bar and she actually has to find out where she should be going at the fucking Town Pump while she's filling up her car.

"Going to the VFW tonight?" a pretty girl with impressive highlights asks as she buys her pack of American Spirits.

The girl behind her is a little short and round but with great boobs and hipster glasses. She's also, apparently, the person Pretty Girl is talking to. "I dunno, probably. Mike's working, right?"

And that's how Hannah finds out that every person in Kalispell under the age of 40 hangs out at the VF-fucking-W.

*

Hannah keeps staying and staying. She's not as lonely as she was in L.A., but she's not exactly rolling in human contact, either. She's actually thought about stopping by the Aero Inn to say hi to Gib, but that seems vaguely pathetic until the day that she runs into him in the grocery store and he stops and talks to her for ten minutes, asking how she's settling in.

After that, sometimes she brings him coffee at work.

He's a nice guy.

Sometimes, Hannah stops at the VFW, just to trick herself into thinking she has people that she can socialize with. The two bartenders, Mike and Dawn, are apparently brother and sister – the brother is nicer to Hannah than the sister, which isn't that surprising. What is surprising is that he's not trying to get into her pants or meet someone she knows, he's just a mumbly, quiet guy with a goatee and pictures on his cell phone of the dog he owns with his girlfriend.

"I've gotten stupid domestic in my old age." He smiles, revealing a mouth full of stained and crooked teeth that Hannah thinks should gross her out, but they just somehow don't.

"Old age?" she says, raising one eyebrow the way Ian taught her. "Yeah, you're getting all geriatric, obviously."

"Hey!" he says, protesting as he pours a Coors Light for one of the actual veterans who don't seem to mind that their bar has been overtaken by groups of 20- and 30-somethings every night of the week. "I just turned 31!"

Younger than Dom, then. That's actually surprising. Hannah thinks of Dominic as a kind of Peter Pan, while Mike seems settled in that way that adults are supposed to be.

Hannah's always forgetting that she's supposed to be an adult now, too.

So maybe the only people Hannah talks to are people being paid to be in the places she finds them, but it's a start. It isn't, however, enough.

Hannah needs to get a job.

*

The problem, of course, is that Hannah doesn't exactly have any skills. She can type and shit and of course she knows how to answer a phone, but her entire work resume consists of acting jobs that she got because of her last name, a failed fashion design career, and attempts at modeling. Nobody really takes "I can manage to get through an entire industry cocktail party without slapping a single person even though I hate all of them" as a job skill, which Hannah thinks is stupid.

Putting up with people is totally a skilled profession.

Hannah ends up applying for every receptionist job that shows up in the local paper, figuring that she could work with the public if she had to and that, if nothing else, she can be charming and she can talk and she has basic computer skills. That should be enough.

It's not, though. It turns out that Hannah doesn't know how to dress for a job interview (one guy actually laughs at her short skirt and heels, the fucker) and she doesn't know how to answer questions about herself without being petulant or schmoozing. Kalispell isn't much of a schmoozing town, which she normally loves, but is really limiting her in the interviews.

Finally, a desperate-sounding woman calls Hannah's cell and asks when she can come in to interview for the dental receptionist job.

"Anytime," Hannah says as she blows smoke up at her ceiling. Viggo had left her hidden notes all over the house when she moved in. The one in the coffeepot asked her not to smoke inside, but fuck that.

"Now?" the woman says.

"Sure," Hannah says, standing up and going to get her sensible interview clothes that she had actually had to have a salesperson at Ross fucking Dress for Less help her find. She gets the address of the building and pulls her sweater over her head, going to brush her teeth.

You can't just walk into a dentist's office with breath that smells like smoke, after all.

*

The woman's name is June and she's a late 40-something woman with premature wrinkles around her eyes on a face that somehow still looks too young.

The interview isn't that long, but the questions are weird. The woman asks about work environments and Hannah's (lack of) job history.

"How do you do with high-stress environments?" June asks, peering carefully at Hannah's face.

It's totally a strange question, considering this is a dentist's office and not a surgeon's, but Hannah's game. "Well, I lived in Hollywood for most of my life," she says, smiling. "I think I've been in more stressful environments than most people my age."

June laughs, a short and loud laugh that seems to surprise her.

Hannah gets the job.

*

It builds slowly, but it's like Hannah looks around one day and snow is falling on the roads. She's been in Kalispell for six months, living in the house for five. She finally turned in her rental car and bought a little Focus from a car dealer who is a friend of June's. Everything in Kalispell is like that – you want a car or a good meal or to have your ears looked at, everyone knows someone who can help.

It's like L.A. in that it's all about referrals and introducing yourself as knowing someone, but it's totally different, too. You're not name-dropping in Kalispell, you're genuinely introducing yourself, creating your own web of relations through the people you know.

Hannah slowly starts meeting people. She doesn't have plans every night, but she has them sometimes. She doesn't love her job (the dentist is a sadistic asshole of a woman, but Hannah can ignore that shit. She's had practice), but she doesn't hate it.

After years of anonymous L.A., Hannah is surprised by how much she loves living in a small town. Kalispell isn't cartoonishly small, but she doesn't go grocery shopping anymore without seeing at least one person that she at least vaguely recognizes. She accepts a hug from Mike when she brings him a dog toy that she saw in the pet store next to her bookstore, she eats dinner at Applebee's sometimes so she can harass June's son while he's working.

She sleeps better and she breathes better and she eats better. After a while, she even buys a television and a DVD player and she can watch movies starring people she used to know. Because she hasn't lost shit, not really. She walked away from all of that, but she gained this.

And no part of this belongs to anyone but her.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://octette.livejournal.com/profile)[**octette**](http://octette.livejournal.com/) and [](http://secrethappiness.livejournal.com/profile)[**secrethappiness**](http://secrethappiness.livejournal.com/) for the betas. My Hannah is strongly inspired by [](http://lalejandra.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://lalejandra.livejournal.com/)**lalejandra**'s Hannah fic from a few years ago, so many many thanks to her for the inspiration.
> 
> Posted as a part of [](http://community.livejournal.com/14valentines/profile)[**14valentines**](http://community.livejournal.com/14valentines/). [[Day 1] Body Image](http://community.livejournal.com/14valentines/100483.html?mode=reply).
> 
> Also posted for [](http://community.livejournal.com/halfamoon/profile)[](http://community.livejournal.com/halfamoon/)**halfamoon**


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